News

Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye by Jane Stevenson

Hardly a household name, Edward Burra is one of those interestingly eccentric minor figures that British art seems to specialise in. Born a privileged Edwardian but cursed by ill health - he was crippled by arthritis before he was 10 - he led an odd, camp, celibate life in Rye in Sussex (which he hated for its quaintness, but never escaped from) and produced an extraordinary body of luscious, sinister, slightly lowlife paintings with a dash of George Grosz, a drop of something South American and a good slosh of baroque morbidity, all shaken up to produce a peculiar surrealism. Sadly, this book doesn't illustrate a single picture, so we have to guess what the Teapot Gods he painted in 1948 might look like, but it does draw heavily on his gloriously idiosyncratic letters and Burra comes shining through in quotation; as he assures a friend, "Aye have quayte a social layfe